After having sadly missed posting on this blog for some time, I thought I’d kick off 2015 by clarifying my intentions, motives and aspirations for this blog as a follow up to my initial introductory post, to make sure any readers and myself maximally benefit from it!
My foremost intention for this blog is a place to share reflections with the rest of the world, to allow my ideas and thoughts to be critiqued, enhanced or ignored to further help refine my thoughts. It also serves a great side-benefit in terms of maximising my impact by providing my most commonly repeated advise for anyone that wants it – getting into medical school being a good example of one that I often get asked about, even though the answer might not be what many hope for.
My blog however wasn’t created so that I could become an “expert” in one specific topic, despite a lot of advice about blogs “finding their niche” audience in a specific subject. I’d rather collate all my thoughts together in one place to reflect the areas that I’m interested in and help build my own narrative, even if many readers may only be interested in a small subset of my posts. I don’t expect this blog to “take off” and become popular for that reason, but I’m content with that considering all the benefits that come just by forcing myself to write my thoughts coherently, as well as the added benefit of potentially helping anyone who stumbles upon it!
Finally, I’m a huge fan of creating over consumption. I watched about 3-5 Hollywood movies in 2014 and I still think that that’s a bit too high. I’d far rather be creating things and living my own life as if it was a movie instead, no matter how much worse the special effects might be. After all, life is fully in our control so it’s up to us to decide how exciting to make it. I did however over-consume in reading articles through 2014, having become a sponge for information, which I reflected on earlier this year. While I still highly value articles as a source of knowledge, I aim to reduce the information overload and replace it with my own article creation and start contributing to the world in a more experientially driven model of learning rather than simply being a sponge.
So I’m incredibly excited for 2015 and all it has to offer; I aim to reflect on more experiences, offer help to those who want it, and create more so I can really start bringing value to the world. Let’s bring on 2015!